BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU

MILIEU When a piece is written often influences How it is written –

its tone & direction “when” shapes “why” and “how”

So it’s important to look at the time period in which a work was written.

MILIEU We have many terms for this

“time period”: milieu environment “writing situation” kairos occasion tempus speciale

MILIEU To determine this, we can ask ourselves the

following questions: Why was it written? What provoked the writer? What event prompted it? What happened/is happening in the contemporary

society? What’s going on in the world, in the culture, in the

news? How are people – such as women, minorities, children

– treated or mistreated? What are the culture’s values, morals, standards,

ideals?

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU porn was different, more violent

rape fantasies 2 types of women:

nymphos & virgins “bang” the virgins once turn into nymphos

not the sanitized version of Skin-E-Max or the air-brushed version of Playboy

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU porn in 1970s, early 1980s:

from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1986 Sometimes the movie she [Aunt Lydia] showed would be an old porno

film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked, with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed. Once we had to watch a woman being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out.

[…] You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then.

[…] They don’t play the soundtrack, on movies like these, though they do on the porno films. They want us to hear the screams and grunts and shrieks of what is supposed to be either extreme pain or extreme pleasure or both at once […]. (118-19)

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU porn was ubiquitous, everywhere

imagine going for a walk downtown or through the mall and seeing in the display cases sexually explicit

rape fantasies – for ALL to see men, women young, old children

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEUo the Sexual Revolution series shown

recently on VH1 helps with some stock footage, perspective, and interviews with Brownmiller and other Feministso http://www.vh1.com/shows/sex_the_revolution

/series.jhtml

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEUo Sexual Revolution

o 1960: birth-control pillo 1972: contraception legal for unmarriedo 1972: Deep Throat gains patina of chico 1973: Roe v. Wadeo 1974: Against Our Will

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU Times Square, NYC:

"worst block in the city." “lawless climate” “We'd hurry past prostitute-filled single-

room-occupancy hotels and massage parlors, greasy spoons and pornographic bookstores; past X-rated movie houses and peep shows and a pathetic assortment of junkies and pushers and johns and hookers and pimps—the whole panorama of big-city low life.”

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU Times Square, NYC:

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU Heard above the Crowd: